But the very same taker tendencies that served Wright well in Fallingwater also precipitated his
nine-year slump. For two decades, until 1911, Wright made his name as an architect living in Chicago
and Oak Park, Illinois, where he benefited from the assistance of craftspeople and sculptors. In 1911,
he designed Taliesin, an estate in a remote Wisconsin valley. Believing he could excel alone, he
moved out there. But as time passed, Wright spun his wheels during “long years of enforced
idleness,” Gill wrote. At Taliesin, Wright lacked access to talented apprentices. “The isolation he
chose by creating Taliesin,” de St. Aubin observes, “left him without the elements that had become
essential to his life: architectural commissions and skillful workers to help him complete his building
designs.”
Frank Lloyd Wright’s drought lasted until he gave up on independence and began to work
interdependently again with talented collaborators. It wasn’t his own idea: his wife Olgivanna
convinced him to start a fellowship for apprentices to help him with his work. When apprentices
joined him in 1932, his productivity soared, and he was soon working on the Fallingwater house,
which would be seen by many as the greatest work of architecture in modern history. Wright ran his
fellowship program for a quarter century, but even then, he struggled to appreciate how much he
depended on apprentices. He refused to pay apprentices, requiring them to do cooking, cleaning, and
fieldwork. Wright “was a great architect,” explained his former apprentice Edgar Tafel, who worked
on Fallingwater, “but he needed people like myself to make his designs work—although you couldn’t
tell him that.”
Wright’s story exposes the gap between our natural tendencies to attribute creative success to
individuals and the collaborative reality that underpins much truly great work. This gap isn’t limited
to strictly creative fields. Even in seemingly independent jobs that rely on raw brainpower, our
success depends more on others than we realize. For the past decade, several Harvard professors
have studied cardiac surgeons in hospitals and security analysts in investment banks. Both groups
specialize in knowledge work: they need serious smarts to rewire patients’ hearts and organize
complex information for stock recommendations. According to management guru Peter Drucker, these
“knowledge workers, unlike manual workers in manufacturing, own the means of production: they
carry that knowledge in their heads and can therefore take it with them.” But carrying knowledge isn’t
actually so easy.
In one study, professors Robert Huckman and Gary Pisano wanted to know whether surgeons get
better with practice. Since surgeons are in high demand, they perform procedures at multiple
hospitals. Over a two-year period, Huckman and Pisano tracked 38,577 procedures performed by
203 cardiac surgeons at forty-three different hospitals. They focused on coronary artery bypass grafts,
where surgeons open a patient’s chest and attach a vein from a leg or a section of chest artery to
bypass a blockage in an artery to the heart. On average, 3 percent of patients died during these
procedures.
When Huckman and Pisano examined the data, they discovered a remarkable pattern. Overall, the
surgeons didn’t get better with practice. They only got better at the specific hospital where they
practiced. For every procedure they handled at a given hospital, the risk of patient mortality dropped
by 1 percent. But the risk of mortality stayed the same at other hospitals. The surgeons couldn’t take
their performance with them. They weren’t getting better at performing coronary artery bypass grafts.
They were becoming more familiar with particular nurses and anesthesiologists, learning about their
strengths and weaknesses, habits, and styles. This familiarity helped them avoid patient deaths, but it
michael s
(Michael S)
#1